Being Grateful

Long years ago while serving as pastor at my first appointment, I came to a moment which gave me the privilege of going to the home of one of the folks of the church for his baptism.  He was late in years and bound to the home by physical circumstances and wanted to profess his faith in Christ and be baptized.  He said, "Most people just assumed I had been baptized, but I wasn't and the older I got, the harder it was to own up to it.  Now is the time."  The moment of gathering in his room with the men of his Sunday School class left a lasting impression on this preacher.

 

Some years later I was reminded of this moment in a powerful way.    Actually, it was more like thirty rather than some.  I got a note from the old man's daughter thanking me for that blessed moment shared with her father.  Even though the note came out of the mail box, it was more like it came out of the blue.  It was good to know I was not the only one who remembered that baptism and it has always been a reminder to me to thank those who have touched our lives in the part which is behind us. 

 

Living with gratitude takes some practice for most of us.  We live in such a rush we fail to see all the people around us who are blessing  us.  To see is to live with gratitude.  And, such is also true of the past.  Some of those who have blessed our lives are gone.  Some of them we surely remembered in recent days as All Saints Day came and went once again.  While we can call their names and thank them even as they dwell in the heavenly place, we can also take a moment and remember some who still walk around us and with us.  These are the ones we can take a moment to express gratitude.  Receiving such a word of thanksgiving from us will surely warm their hearts and, in the process, it may warm ours a bit as well. 

A Word From God

During a recent morning read of the Word, I stumbled into a verse which had never slowed me down much on previous readings.  Mostly, I just breezed through the section to get on to what was next which is something most readers of the Word have done from time to time.  Why it grabbed my attention this time is just part of the mystery which goes with reading the Scripture.  It is a simple phrase which creates a militaristic image, something some readers would shun or want to put in another context. 

In a description of himself as a servant of God, he wrote, "...with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left..."  (II Corinthians 6:7)  Several thing are obvious.  Both hands are full.  The right hand would surely hold the offensive weapon and the left would hold the defensive one.  Paul surely had the Greek soldier with his sword and shield in mind.  The one making the weapons necessary is not of flesh and blood, but the very power of evil which constantly seeks to undermine and destroy the work of God in the world.

In another place in another letter, the matter is made even more clear.  "Put on the whole armor of God so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil...Stand therefore...take the shield of faith...Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God." (Ephesians 6:10-17)  To put the Christian journey in such an adversarial context is not the most popular of views and many find it an outdated one and unacceptable as well.  But, there is one important thing which must always be remembered about the written Word. What it says is not what we want it to say, but what God wanted it to say. 

Saintly Stories

While it is certainly true that the Scripture has some deep theological sections which can even cause the scholars to scratch their heads as they try to understand what cannot be understood, it is also true that it is one great big story book.  From the Garden of Eden to the Isle of Patmos great stories abound.   Long before I had any inclination to delve into Job or Jeremiah, Romans or Ephesians, I became enthralled and captivated by the stories of the men and women who walked the pages of the Holy Word. 

 

It is interesting that there are so many stories of so many different kinds of people.  Some were deemed good and righteous and some were deemed unfaithful and evil.  There are stories which center on Abraham and all his clan, Moses and the Hebrew people, calling stories of prophets, birth announcement stories, stories filled with tragedy, and stories filled with people who dared to do the impossible.  The people of the Scripture are remembered in stories of their lives.  Even today their stories are told.

 

As we moved through a season of All Saints celebrations, it is good to remember the stories of those we remember.  We called their names on Sunday in a moment of scared remembrance.  It is also important to remember their stories.  Their stories include the way our lives were made different by their sacrifice, their love, and their hand upon our lives.  Their stories have changed our lives.  We are blessed because we knew them well enough to know their stories.  As we write the final words about this season of celebration and remembrance, may we take a moment to tell their stories, even if there is no one to hear, and to thank them and God for the stories they shared with us. 

Going to the Roost

Chickens on the farm provide fresh eggs.  Nothing like picking up eggs from the nest one day and eating them for breakfast the next morning.  Those birds also range across the place making a pass each day in the garden where they do a little bug control work.  The ones around here seem to enjoy following us around clucking and making chicken noises as they go.  In order to be good company, I have learned to mimic them which, perhaps, means I have learned a few chicken words. 

 

These chickens of ours do more than provide breakfast and entertainment.  They also teach lessons about living.  One of the lessons is taught each evening as they go back into the chicken house for the night.  They have no clocks in the chicken pen, but every evening as the darkness gets ready to settle over the farm, they head for the roost.  They work all day.  They are constantly scratching in the dirt and eating stuff I cannot see,  but as evening comes they go into rest mode as they settle on the roost.

As I reflect  back over the years, I see too many times when I lived out of sync with what was happening in the creation.  So often the creation was gearing down, darkness was settling in announcing the work day was done, and I kept going.  Getting ahead and the opinion of others was more important than self care which is what the coming darkness invites us to do.  The chickens know when it is time to call it a day and go to the roost.  Our Creator God brought a creation into being which includes the same signals for creatures like you and me so we would know when it was time to go to the roost.  Too many times I just paid no attention to the clock of creation.  Maybe one day I will be able to live more like a chicken.   

Seeing and Hearing

There are more words to hear through God's creation than a person has ears to hear.  And, there is more to see of God than anyone who walks the earth has eyes to see.  The creation speaks to us of God and reveals more of His presence than a life time of listening or seeing would allow us to know.  As it is, we might catch sight of some of it, but it is always going to be like the tip of the iceberg.  There will always be more out there in the unfolding Mystery than can be heard or seen.

As surely as the sun rises and makes its daily journey across the sky, God is present, God is evident, and God is revealing in our lives.  Our inability to fully experience this ever present divine reality in each moment and in any given hour is not the Creator's fault, but the created ones whose eyes are dimmed by the sight of lofty personal ambitions and whose ears are closed by the sound of accumulating silver coins.  This generation is not the first to deprive the soul of the revealing presence of the Holy One  and it will not be the last. 

In the Word of God there is a Word written by the Apostle Paul which speaks of the power of the creation to point those who see and hear toward the Creator.  In Romans 1:19-20 the Words speaks saying, "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  Ever since the creation of the world His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made."   The creation and the order which is a part of it is full of the Holy.  Some see.  Some do not.  But, whether we see or not, the unfolding plans of God for making Himself known to us is always before us, behind us, around us, and even within us. 

Heart Warmings

I am not sure when I first shared in an All Saints Sunday worship service, but what I do not know is that after one, I was hooked on making sure I gave leadership to it for all the years which followed.   Perhaps, it had to do with the way it enabled me to connect with a deep loss of my own within the context of a moment in the presence of the God who knows the day of our coming before we come and the day of our going before we go.  And at another level, it gave life to something so often ignored in our contemporary worship:  the expression of emotions that sometimes range out of control.

 

How we got to such a place has not always been easy to figure.  The early days of the history of spiritual life in this country has stories of powerful spiritual awakenings, protracted meetings, and camp meetings.  The preaching did not seek to educate, or to enlighten, but to persuade those who gathered to believe in Jesus.  While there may have been more fire and fear than love and mercy in that early preaching, the purpose was to bring people into a life changing encounter with the Christ.

 

It often seems that we have not only suppressed the expression of raw emotion in worship, but that we have also come to a place where we preach about Jesus as a nice guy who wants us to do better.  At best such preaching is a perversion of the gospel.  The gospel is about how Christ makes us new, not better.  It is about the blood of Jesus being shed on a cross as a divine means of making it possible for us to be at one with God again.  It is about a love that makes every love pale in comparison.  It is a gospel not just meant for the brain, but for the heart.  I have always liked the Wesleyan expression, "a heart strangely warmed" and wish that there were more heart warmings in worship than we seem to be seeing.

A Special Moment

The Christian calendar gives a preacher some great preaching Sundays.  Of course, at the top of the heap is Easter.  Any preacher who gives up the opportunity to preach on Easter Sunday should find other work.  Some of my other special preaching moments came on Baptism of the Lord Sunday.  I loved preaching on baptism and then standing back to watch people come for baptism who did not come to worship expecting to be baptized.  If there is a Sunday for watching the Spirit at work, it is surely this Sunday early in January.

 

Another very special preaching Sunday comes this Sunday as the church gathers on All Saints Sunday.  When I was preaching that Sunday, there was always a moment in the ritual for calling out the names of the remembered dead.  What a rich blessing it was to stand in a moment of such powerful remembrances.  It was also a Sunday when the visible community gathered around the Table with the invisible community of faithful witnesses for the holy meal hosted by the Lord.  An image which was ever before me on that Sunday was a long table.  On one end we gathered and on the other end just beyond the veil they gathered.  We were here and they were there. 

 

Gathered around such a Table on All Saints Day is what I came to understand as the communion of the saints.  Some of the saints are in heaven and some are here.  But, this particular Table gathering is one of those rare moments when the church has an opportunity to celebrate the One Community that is not separated by the veil of death.  I am grateful to the church for giving me a place to preach all these years and for the Christ who dared to call a most unqualified and inadequate boy to preach the gospel Sunday after Sunday after Sunday for a life time.